Thank you for your comments. My wife and I are interested in going the affiliate marketing route as well. What we need now are the specifics on how to set up and structure the affiliate marketing business relationships with vendors / sellers / manufacturers. What agreement(s) govern these relationships? What are the steps to going from where we are now, at square one and no current relationships with sellers, to having binding contractual relationships and receiving checks in the mail? Can anyone give us the play by play on this process?
Although there is complete control over the types of products to promote or market on the website, shipping cannot be controlled because product sellers handle that. Sellers ship the ordered products at their own convenience (such as waiting to collect multiple orders from a single location and sending them all in one go). Because of similar reasons, customers are often seen complaining about late receipt of their orders.
Affiliate Marketing involves less work compared to Dropshipping. As far as making more money from Dropshipping I think that is open to debate and depends of your cost. Before people buy from your store you need to spend in building a brand. An affiliate marketer do not have to worry too much about that because the merchant he/she is selling for has probably taken care of that.

Creating a unique tracking ID for an Amazon link is easy. Simply log in to your Amazon affiliate dashboard, click “Account Settings” at the very top on the right, then click “Manage Tracking IDs”. From there you can make a new tracking ID so you can track which web page/campaign sold what. You can learn more about using Amazon’s Tracking IDs here.

Focus on reviewing products that fall within your niche. Then, leveraging the rapport you have created with your audience and your stance as an expert, tell your readers why they would benefit from purchasing the product you are promoting. It is especially effective to compare this product to others in the same category. Most importantly, make sure you are generating detailed, articulate content to improve conversions.

I’m sure you have heard it many times but providing the value to your readers should be a priority. Don’t send them an email full of ads. Any advertisement should be relevant to the content. Remember that content comes first, ads come second. Talk about the benefits, not features. If you have a product you want to promote, think what value it can bring and add relevant info.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's' journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom line.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you're also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Wow, Jeff! Fantastic article. Lots of great info to refer back on. You first came to my attention through the Profit Academy coaching & I sought your website from there. I love your very personal writing style. It is obvious that you are passionate about your work and care about people. You share top grade knowledge without the fluff. It is a powerful combination and why I listen when you speak. Thank you for gifting us the benefit of your insight.

Now this one is the biggest for me, but drop shipping will open up new traffic sources and ways to find customers. I have ran plenty of affiliate sites in the past ten years, and I still have some affiliate sites which have generated close to seven figures in commissions alone. Affiliate marketing works, but it’s totally different from drop shipping for how you get people to your site.
Affiliate marketing doesn’t allow you to set your own prices and so you rely solely on commission. Dropshipping, on the other hand, enables you to set the price so that you can make as much profit off of an item as you want. However, it’s quite easy to get this wrong, and if you price your products too high or too low, then you will put people off.
“A year later, I saw her at an event and asked her about it, and apologized if I offended her in some way. She said I didn’t, but that an average mailing for her did $50,000 in commissions… So when I kept hitting her up, I was pretty tone deaf to the fact that I had cost her a significant amount of money that day by mailing an offer that didn’t convert well to her list, and then I kept annoying her with follow up emails.”
I agree with most of your sentiments except on the issue of paying a membership fee. Legitimate manufacturers and distributors DO NOT charge membership fees. At most, a nominal $3-$5 service charge if your order is under a certain amount. Rarely is it a good idea to deal with a supplier that is charging any type of monthly or yearly membership fee because they are middle men and you're not going to get as great a wholesale price as you would from the manufacturer or distributor. Ideally, it's smart to contact suppliers that do not advertise drop shipping on their website, then once you become an approved Reseller ask them to drop ship for you. Many of the manufacturers that I work with offer the same product price whether you use drop shipping or arbitrage. .
Affiliate networks also make it very easy to find products and services to promote. They will list advertisers by category and show which advertisers other publishers are currently having the most success with. Commission Junction, a large affiliate advertising network, currently has nearly 3,000 different advertisers listed. You will have the most success by promoting products that are closely related to the content that you write about. If you had a website about investing, you would primarily want to promote investing related services like stock brokerages and stock research tools. You wouldn’t get good results by promoting unrelated services like web hosting and domain name registration services.
Affiliate Marketing is where you promote someone else’s product and earn a compensation when you refer sales. So you, basically, find products that appeal to your audience, promote these products (or services) to others, and earn either a percentage or a flat amount on each sale that you generate for the merchants that you promote. You don’t get to dictate the price of the product or the commission earned. For example, if you decide to run a fitness site, you could promote fitness related products – gym gear and supplements. You join “XYZ Supplements” affiliate program. You write a review on your site about the product and include your affiliate links. Someone clicks on the link, gets redirected to the merchant’s website, buys the product, conversions are tracked, products are shipped to the customer, and you get paid! So you don’t have any of the headaches of selling products – your only job is to write a post and market to your audience.

Your display ads should be visually stimulating to viewers and aim to hold their attention long enough to entice them to click to your website. Though it's natural to want to share all the details about your product, you should be as simple as possible with your display ads so that viewers aren't overwhelmed. If you include too much information right off the bat, viewers could stop reading or lose interest - simply because there's too much to read. The ad should be simple and direct.
Two methods of setting up reasonably passive income online are dropshipping and affiliate marketing. At first glance, they seem somewhat similar, with a few pros and cons for each that can make a decision easy. But wait! There are actually some subtle differences that might sway you in one direction or another. Which one is better, and which should you pick?
Open rate shows a percentage of total recipients that viewed your email. You can track it in HTML emails that include a transparent image (a tracking pixel). When it’s loaded, an email is tracked as open. This metric isn’t 100% accurate. As mentioned earlier, some email providers block images, and a user needs to enable them to see the visual elements.
Through our global affiliate network, we empower marketers to engage shoppers across the entire consumer journey. Affiliate success comes down to partnerships — we connect advertisers with publishers to reach new audiences and influence repeat purchases. Our solutions create a holistic strategy that delivers proven incremental revenue and is continually optimized for performance.
#5- Introduce Curiosity in Subject Lines– The third thing you’ll notice is my subject lines are designed to tease the reader. We all get a ton of email in our inboxes. As a result, I write my headlines either to show the benefit the subscriber will receive OR to create enough curiosity to make them open the message. To be honest, I’m always tweaking my headlines to maximize open rates. You should do the same!
Packaging and delivery are processed by the dropshipper. You, as a retailer, don’t need to worry about this. The supplier will deliver the items to the buyer’s doorstep with your store’s name on the package. The dropshipping supplier will provide an upgraded catalogue, with proper descriptions and images for every product. However, we recommend that you modify the descriptions a little in order to avoid a SEO penalisation from Google.
Building trust with your audience is paramount in affiliate marketing, and the quickest way to lose trust is to recommend products either you haven’t used before or that aren’t a good fit for your audience. Also make sure you never tell anyone to directly buy a product, you are simply recommending the product. The more helpful you are and the more you make quality recommendations, the more likely your web visitors will come back for your expertise.
Fortunately, the answer is no. Most folks – upwards of 95% of Americans – are sales-averse, i.e. they don’t like pitching goods to others AND they don’t like being bombarded with high-pressure sales tactics. However, they are willing to consider offers from people they know, like and trust. This is where you and your subscriber list come in. You might have heard the old saying, "people hate to be sold but they love to buy".
Honestly, when I say “be real” – I mean it. Don’t be afraid to talk about your failures with people (on your list). They want to know that you weren’t BORN rich, or one of those naturally fit people that was just made to be a fitness model. They want to hear your story, they want to hear your struggles, they went to know that you were in the SAME PLACE AS THEY ARE RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!
That’s a great tip Sean, thanks! I was thinking about what you said in your post about some companies not putting that they have affiliate links and you having to do some digging and there are couple of companies/authors who made products I love and keep using, but I’m not sure how to go ahead and ask about the affiliate link. I read the post you linked below about asking for guest blogging, which I thought was a must-read, and so, if you think of doing a follow-up on this one, would love to read some of your tips and do’s and don’t about this. Thanks again, Sean, you’re doing some very inspiring work here!
“Let’s say that they mailed for you and did $7,500 in commission,” she said. “I would send them stats within 12 hours, congratulate them, let them know that they did well over the $5,000 they considered successful, and ask if they could get a mailing to un-opens, and if they can rebook the deal very soon in the future. This is an easy way of getting a lot more out of the deal, and setting yourself up for another successful mailing in the future with that partner.”
Creating a unique tracking ID for an Amazon link is easy. Simply log in to your Amazon affiliate dashboard, click “Account Settings” at the very top on the right, then click “Manage Tracking IDs”. From there you can make a new tracking ID so you can track which web page/campaign sold what. You can learn more about using Amazon’s Tracking IDs here.
Aim for quality over quantity. Having a vast network of affiliates will not necessarily help you earn more money. According to some experts, the key to successful affiliate marketing is to find the right affiliates that will drive the most results for your platform. Those affiliates may be big sites, small sites, or a combination of the two, but the most important thing is to build and maintain strong relationships with your chosen affiliates.[40]
LinkConnector imposes a very rigorous and lengthy screening process, so you’ll need to prove that you have a high-quality website and established audience before being accepted. Despite its somewhat schizophrenic approach, LinkConnector does have some very happy long-term affiliates. And their “naked links” allow for direct connection to the merchant website without having to be rerouted via LinkConnector, which will give your website an SEO boost.
As an affiliate, the sky is literally the limit. Since we are not constrained by how many orders we can process in a day, or how many customers we can deal with in a day, our income potential is limitless. Assuming we pick the correct niche and get good SERP rankings, we are golden. Of course this is easier than it sounds, but when you get traffic, it is free, except for your time. (We don’t use pay per click, so we rely strictly on organic search engine rankings to drive traffic.)
When you create sign-up or subscription forms, include options for subscribers to self-select preferences. Even free platforms like MailChimp allow you to provide segmenting options. For instance, you can ask subscribers about particular interests, product preferences, or content interests. Options for affiliate marketers may include: 1) Newsletters, 2) Deals and Discounts, 3) Announcements and 4) New Product Updates. Some subscribers may select to receive content on all of these, whereas others might only have interest in one or two.
After being putative into an affiliate program, marketers receive a unique URL that includes their affiliate ID. They share that unique URL with their subscribers, site visitors, and social networks via text links or ads. When somebody clicks on that link, affiliate software accounts that click and any resulting creation sales in the affiliate’s account. When directives reach a pre-determined verge, the associate is paid.
To those on the outside, affiliate marketing can seem like a black box. It’s inner workings are mysterious to most marketers and in many companies it’s not treated with the same seriousness as other channels. Some marketers, only familiar with the bad reputation acquired by some industry players in the 2000s, deride it as a source of spam and little more.